Harris will campaign at Arizona’s border with Mexico in an effort to show his strength on immigration

WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris will visit the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona on Friday as her campaign tries to turn the larger issue of immigration from a burden into a strength and hopes to counter a series of frequent, sharp political attacks from the former president Donald Trump.

Her campaign team announced Wednesday that Harris will be in Douglas, Arizona, across the border from Agua Prieta, Mexico.

An aide to Harris, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a still-planned trip, said the vice president plans to speak about border security and how, as California’s former attorney general, she cracked down on international gangs and criminal organizations that traffic drugs, weapons and people. She has also long believed the country needs an immigration system that is safe, fair, orderly and humane, the aide said.

Trump has built his campaign in part around calls for stricter immigration measures and the southern border, even supporting the use of police and military forces to carry out mass deportations if elected in November. Harris has increasingly tried to seize on the issue and push back against her opponent, though polls show voters trust Trump more on this.

The importance of immigration and the border in the run-up to Election Day was demonstrated by the fact that Trump wasted little time reacting to news of Harris’s trip. He told a crowd in Mint Hill, North Carolina, that Harris was going to the border “for political reasons” and because “their polls are down.”

“When Kamala talks about the border, her credibility is less than zero,” Trump said. “I hope you remember that on Friday. When she tells you about the border, ask her one simple question: ‘Why didn’t you do it four years ago?’

That plays into a theme Trump has been hitting at nearly all of his campaign rallies, where he ridicules Harris as a former Biden administration “border czar” and claims she oversaw softer federal policies that allowed millions of people to enter the country illegally.

President Joe Biden has tasked Harris with working to address the root causes of immigration patterns which has led many people fleeing violence and drug gangs in Central America to seek asylum at the US border. She was not, however, called the border czar.

Since succeeding Biden as the leader of the Democratic presidential ticket, Harris has lamented the collapse of a bipartisan border security deal in Congress that most Republican lawmakers have rejected it at Trump’s request. Her campaign aide said she will use Friday’s border shutdown to push for reviving that package, which was the toughest in a generation.

In an interview with MSNBC that aired Wednesday night, Harris talked about reviving the law, but also about helping people in the country illegally obtain U.S. citizenship.

“We need a comprehensive plan,” she said, “that includes what we need to do to not only strengthen our border, but also deal with the fact that we also need to create pathways for people to gain citizenship.”

The stop is part of Harris’ broader effort to turn immigration into an issue she can win over more supporters, arguing that Trump would rather play politics with the problem than find solutions. At the same time, she has promised more humane treatment of immigrants if she wins the White House.

In June, Biden announced rules banning migrants who are granted asylum when US officials believe that the southern border is overwhelmed. Since then, the number of arrests for illegal border crossings has decreased.

Nevertheless, a new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research Published this month, Trump has an advantage over Harris, who voters trust to better handle immigration. The issue has also been a problem for Biden: illegal immigration and border crossings at the U.S. border with Mexico have been a challenge for much of his administration. The poll also found that Republicans are more concerned about immigration.

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Associated Press editor Will Weissert contributed to this report.